5 - Gender identity

Question 1

Define Gender role and Gender identity.

Answer 1

• Gender role: behaviours typically associated with males or females
  → gender roles differ from culture to culture
• Gender identity: identifying and accepting the self as male or female
  → this is a more personnel sens

Question 2

By age __, we start to exhibit some knowledge of gender-typical activities.

Answer 2

24 months
- we primarily observe modeling
→ they model behaviour on what they’ve seen; either mimicking mother or father

Question 3

Explain the sequence of childhood gender role development (gender labelling).

Answer 3

• Under 18 months: fail at gender labelling
• By 24 months: most are correct in labelling based on only superficial characteristics
  → p.ex: a woman who’s holding a hammer will be seen as a man (association with Bob the builder)
  → typically gender is determined by hair
• At age 3, most children lack gender constancy
  → Gender as permanent, unchangeable
  → Comprised of:
  → Gender stability: Gender as a stable personal characteristic
  → kids will believe that, for example, if a boy is dressed as Elsa, he’s a girl today, they don’t have the concept of stability
  → Gender consistency: Retain gender even when physical features/behaviours change
  → You can have stability w/o consistency but not the other way around

Question 4

What are some differences between boys and girls when talking about adopting gender roles and developing gender knowledge?

Answer 4

• Greater pressure on boys to adopt the typical and approved gender role
  → masculine fragility starts very young, they absorb this information from their peers
• Girls are allowed greater leeway in behaviour (tomboy vs sissy)
  → because it’s seen as reaching upwards (men being superior to women, it’s okay for girls to act like boys, but if boys act like girls, it’s seen poorly)
• Girls develop gender knowledge faster than boys, but boys learn about male gender roles faster and show more stability of gender-typed preferences by age 3

Question 5

True or false: Children evaluate their own gender more positively than the other gender and learn about their own gender faster.

Answer 5

True: this applies to most concepts for children; anything that concerns them they’ll be interested in

Question 6

Around age __, boys spend more time in gender-typed activities.

Answer 6

11
→ through the school years, with reinforcement from their peers of gender norms
→ this is the age when you’re trying to figure out the world and fit in

Question 7

The pattern is that first we ___ gender roles, then we learn that we can ___ them

Answer 7

Learn; break

Question 8

True or false: Boys/men are more flexible about gender roles than girls/women, especially girls/women who have rigid personal gender roles.

Answer 8

False: It is the other way around

Question 9

What are some social influences on men that promote flexibility?

Answer 9

• Bachelorhood, working moms, nurturing fathers, feminist friends as an adult
  → being a bachelor (living on his own) involves doing the male and female assigned tasks for a household, which allows the development of flexibility
  → kids who grow up with working moms have more flexibility because they see that certain roles are shared
  → feminist friends, i.e., having friends who challenge your opinions that may be problematic

Question 10

How can parents influence children on gender role development?

Answer 10

• Modelling
  → if a parent swears in front of the kids, the kids are gonna swear
• Differential treatment of sons vs daughters
• Opportunities that parents encourage (toys, activities, chores)
  → boys are often given one-off chores (mowing the lawn, clean their room, etc.); these are done every so often
  → girls are often given long-term chores (doing the dishes, the laundry, etc.)
• Extent to which they monitor and supervise child’s friends and activities

Question 11

When talking about demographics in the US, how do African American families display gender roles?

Answer 11

• African American families were more egalitarian, especially those with single mothers
  → the idea of women being very delicate and useless is typically a very Western and white idea; it’s the privilege to only have one spouse working
  → in the poorer classes, everyone who could work did to help

Question 12

When talking about demographics in the US, how do Hispanic families display gender roles?

Answer 12

• Hispanic families were less egalitarian than African American families, with strong differences in parental attitudes and treatment for boys and girls during childhood and adolescence. Boys were allowed more freedoms, girls did more chores
  → Especially in families that were more strongly affiliated with Hispanic culture

Question 13

When talking about demographics in the US, how do families w/o fathers display gender roles?

Answer 13

• Families w/o fathers showed kids closer to their mothers and sons with more feminine (but not fewer masculine) traits
• Single moms have kids who are higher in “masculine” traits (independent, self- reliant, assertive)

Question 14

True or false: Lesbian moms have kids with fewer traditional attitudes.

Answer 14

True

Question 15

How will daughters be influenced when they have women who work outside the home in their families?

Answer 15

Women who work outside the home have daughters with more flexible gender roles and sons and daughters with more egalitarian attitudes towards family life

Question 16

Many parents endorse equality, but still serve as gendered role models; in what 2 ways is this shown?

Answer 16

1) Types of employment
2) Division of household chores

Question 17

How will peers influence gender development?

Answer 17

Differences in activities
- Boys are rougher, more competitive, form hierarchies (who’s the fastest, strongest, etc.)
- Hirls tend to have more cooperative and social play
Peers may act as the “gender police”
- Curtailing cross-gender behaviors
→ Especially in early, middle childhood
→ they’ll look at the older kids and follow what they do
- Or may act to promote gender flexibility
→ As is often the case in older youth, e.g., college-age

Question 18

How can we see gender bias in the media?

Answer 18

• When the media is trying to sell a story, you don’t want to distract the viewer from the plot
  → so they often won’t challenge gender rules and norms in order to not distract from the main point of the plot
• Media provide inaccurate and systematically biased information about gender:
  → Males: Older, more prestigious, often the lead character
  → Females: Younger, less likely to be employed, often secondary characters
  → Much less visible as older women

Question 19

Even when the male actors are in their __s, their leading ladies remain in their __s, because it’s more attractive

Answer 19

50; 30

Question 20

What are 4 sources of influence of our gender identity development?

Answer 20

1) Biological factors
2) Family environment
→ when growing up, family informs you on what gender and gender roles should be; if you’re growing up in an environment where gender roles are flexible, it’s easier to move around in gender without worrying about it
3) Peers
→ when you’re able to grow with your peers and criticize gender roles as well as be informed by them, it will influence our notions of gender
4) Media

Question 21

From the biological factors of gender development, how does the evolutionary view explain gender?

Answer 21

• Girls: expressions of nurturing
  → more likely to have social games, but it isn’t clear how much of that is taught by society, rather than innate
• Boys: exploring the environment

Question 22

How do prenatal hormones influence gender development?

Answer 22

• Girls high in ‘masculine’ behaviour had mothers with higher levels of testosterone during pregnancy
  → some studies have found that in women with high testosterone levels, their babies will more likely have masculine type behaviours (aggression, not tomboys where their behaviour is boyish)
• Hormone levels had no effect on gender identity
  → it can linked with behaviour of the baby, but not necessarily gender identity

Question 23

Reiner followed 14 children born with cloacal exstrophy; what did his research show?

Answer 23

• Boys with no penises would often surgically be given a vagina
• The first study followed 14 XY individuals–genetic males, with an intersex appearance of no penis but normal testicles, and normal male hormone levels at birth. Twelve of the children were reassigned female, yet the parents reported that all displayed typical male behaviour throughout childhood
• Six of the 12 switched themselves to the male gender between the ages of 5 and 12 years, and the two children not subjected to surgery were psychologically well-adjusted males who do not have penises

Question 24

Why was sex reassignment the default for so many decades?

Answer 24

• The roots of sex reassignment trace back to the behavioural movement of the 1950s and 1960s
  → this movement was focused on the idea that humans are born as blank slates and behaviour and identity is formed by socialization
  → but there is an innate gender identity
• The first erroneous assumption is that sexual intercourse is the most important thing that a human does, which is certainly not true
• Second, is that the penis is the most important sexual organ
• The clinicians went the opposite way of the biological view, assuming that gender identity was purely socialized

Question 25

True or false: Gender identity has a very significant biological influence, caused in part by development in utero

Answer 25

True: Efforts to masculinize or feminize a child or adult against what they “feel is right” are likely to be unsuccessful as well as to cause significant harm to the individual

Question 26

Before having gender dysphoria in the DSM-5, there was Gender identity disorder; what were the criteria for this diagnosis?

Answer 26

• Previously, had to meet four of five DSM criteria:
  → cross-sex behaviors
  → cross-sex toy and activity preferences
  → cross-sex peer affiliation
  → cross-dressing
  → a stated desire to be the other sex

Question 27

What were the 2 sides of the argument on whether to retain or remove Gender Identity Disorder?

Answer 27

• Those who fought to retain Gender Identity Disorder were largely concerned with individuals being able to seek treatment for distress surrounding the incongruence between sex and gender as well as medical treatment to change one’s sex to correspond with one’s gender. Insurance companies would be unwilling to pay for treatment of an illness that did not have a diagnosis
• Those who advocated for the removal of Gender Identity Disorder argued that classifying people whose psychological gender did not match their biological sex as mentally ill undoubtedly stigmatized such individuals, leading to discrimination and adding to their distress
  → In the end, the issue was resolved by replacing Gender Identity Disorder with Gender Dysphoria

Question 28

What are the 2 requirements for a diagnosis of Gender dysphoria?

Answer 28

1) Incompatibility between psychological gender and biological sex
2) Distress due to this incompatibility, including impairment in daily functioning

Question 29

Gender dysphoria is a common component in children, its persistence into ___ is a better predictor of seeking a change to the other sex than similar feelings during childhood or attraction to cross-gender behaviour.

Answer 29

Adolescence
→ usually if a child is identifying as trans, the parents will typically wait to adolescence to make more permanent changes

Question 30

Many negative outcomes of being trans are due to social reactions to the condition, not the condition itself; what are some of these social reactions?

Answer 30

→ conditional dysphoria, harassment, discrimination, violence, isolation
→ one of the talking points to people opposing trans identities is that people who are trans are more likely to kill themselves, but that is due to the oppression